Five Years of Taliban Rule Built on a Lack of Accountability, Not Reform: HRW

The latest Human Rights Watch report on Afghanistan, released ahead of the Taliban’s fifth anniversary in power on 15 August 2026, reads less like an update and more like an inventory of consolidation. Five years after taking over Kabul, the Taliban have moved well past the early promises of moderation into a governance model where documented abuse has become routine rather than exceptional.

Girls’ education has been among the earliest and most enduring casualties. The March 2022 ban on secondary schooling for girls has now denied an entire generation the chance to become doctors, engineers, or teachers. This is not a policy gap. It is a deliberate closing of futures, one cohort at a time.

Women’s restrictions have not simply persisted; they have hardened. The August 2024 Law on the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice entrenches near-total control over women’s movement, dress, and public presence. Human Rights Watch’s conclusion that these amounts to the crime against humanity of gender persecution is not rhetorical excess; it echoes the International Criminal Court’s own determination, reflected in arrest warrants issued in July 2025 against two senior Taliban leaders. Both remain at large.

That gap, between documentation and consequence, runs through the rest of the report. Revenge killings and enforced disappearances of former security personnel continue despite public amnesty pledges. Independent media has been reduced to a fraction of its former self. Individuals accused of Islamic State links face execution or disappearance without due process. Fear, not law, remains the operative mechanism of control.

Afghanistan’s humanitarian collapse deepens all of this. More than 3.7 million children face acute malnutrition, and half the population needs food or medical assistance, a crisis worsened by the Taliban’s own restrictions on women aid workers, often the only personnel able to reach women and girls in need. Access to survival itself, in other words, has been conditioned on the regime’s own restrictions.

The refugee dimension deserves particular scrutiny, not least because it implicates Pakistan directly. HRW notes that Pakistan and Iran have deported or forced the return of nearly five million Afghans, a figure that sits uneasily against the report’s broader finding that many returnees, particularly women, journalists, and former officials, face serious risk under Taliban rule. This is a genuine tension, not one to explain away. Pakistan’s own position is that repatriation responds to documented security concerns, including undocumented individuals linked to cross-border militancy, rather than indifference to humanitarian consequence. Both realities can hold at once: a state managing legitimate security imperatives along a volatile frontier, and returnees who genuinely face danger on arrival.

What is harder to contest is the accountability vacuum sitting beneath all of this. The ICC’s warrants remain unenforced. Its prosecutor has, by HRW’s own account, deprioritised investigating the former Afghan government and international forces, a selectivity that raises its own questions even as the pursuit of Taliban accountability remains justified. The UN’s Independent Investigative Mechanism for Afghanistan, established only in October 2025, marks a belated step toward preserving evidence. But evidence preservation is not justice. Five years on, no mechanism has produced a consequence the Taliban leadership visibly fears.

Perhaps the report’s most consequential finding is not the scale of abuse, already documented consistently since 2021, but the durability of impunity surrounding it. Condemnation has been a constant of Taliban-era Afghanistan. Enforceable consequence has not. A regime that pays no meaningful cost for gender persecution, extrajudicial killing, or the suppression of dissent has little incentive to change conduct that also shapes regional security, from cross-border militancy to the refugee flows still reaching Pakistan and Iran.

Five years in, the task ahead is not further documentation, a project HRW and others have already carried out with rigour. It is testing whether the accountability architecture built since 2025, the ICC warrants, the IIMA, the CEDAW-based initiative led by Germany, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands, can become more than a record for history.